'Double Whammy'?! Historical Glimpses of Black Deaf Americans

COPAS—‘Double Whammy’: Historical Glimpse of Black Deaf Americans Issue 18.2 (2017) ‘Double Whammy’?! Historical Glimpses of Black Deaf Americans Anja Werner ABSTRACT: Discrimination on account of both one’s hearing status and skin color can be disabling— but it can also be enabling, as I will show in this historical overview on Black deaf Americans. I examine Black deaf Americans as a minority group within a minority past and present, their changing relationship with signed language, and their activism especially with regard to desegregating education. I argue that Black deaf persons have significantly contributed to American culture, although their contributions have gone largely unacknowledged. KEYWORDS: Black Deaf History; Black Deaf Education; Desegregation; Black Deaf Power; Black Deaf Advocates; Deaf Pride “Being both Black and deaf is in many ways a ‘double whammy’ because of society’s abrogation of each of these two minorities. When the conditions of Blackness and deafness are combined in one person, the individual effects of prejudice, discrimination, and negative self-image are compounded exponentially.” McCay Vernon, 1983 “Many deaf people have high expectations of themselves. Many Black deaf people are the only persons in their family to attend and graduate from college” Ernest Hairston and Linwood Smith, 1983 Introduction Leafing through boxes with materials about the 1963 International Congress on the Education of the Deaf in Washington, D.C., at the Gallaudet University Archives, I found two newspaper images depicting a few white deaf1 girls engaged in a rhythmic demonstration 1 Deafness is a very diverse phenomenon. In this article, I discuss Black deaf persons in general—not only those who use signed language and consider themselves to be a part of Deaf culture. For this reason I spell deaf with a small “d.” It would merit a separate paper to discuss terminology sensitively with regard to different types of hearing status as well as to explore whether—or in what instances— to spell the term ‘deaf`’ with a capital D. See National Association of the Deaf (NAD). 1 COPAS—‘Double Whammy’: Historical Glimpse of Black Deaf Americans Issue 18.2 (2017) with a teacher giving the beat. Across the lower left-hand corner of the first picture, a Black arm contrasts the white girls’ happy faces. The Black girl is seen only from behind; a second photograph more clearly shows that in this 1963 newspaper image of deaf achievements the white girls are at the center with the Black girl on the side (Celand, “These Pupils” D-8). The pictures raise the question in which ways racism has affected black deaf Americans. Disability rights activist Frank G. Bowe2 observed in 1971 that Black deaf Americans constitute a “minority within a minority” (Bowe Educational, “Psychological”), which means that discrimination based on one’s racial identity has also permeated the deaf community. Indeed, back in 1950, the bylaws of the American National Association of the Deaf (NAD) stated that “[a]ny white deaf citizen of the United States may become a member” (Emerson, “The Race Question,” my emphasis). Deaf American history is apparently as segregated as is hearing American history. As Aya Kremp put it, Black deaf persons have been discriminated against on three different levels: by white hearing Americans, by white deaf Americans, and by Black hearing Americans (Kremp, “Konferenz” 418), which raises the question of what exactly it meant and still means to be both Black and deaf. Which strategies did Black deaf persons devise to deal with the different layers of discrimination they faced, and could this actually provide for positive means of identification especially for Black deaf children today? Black deaf Americans are a heterogeneous group on various levels. Black deaf academics Ernest Hairston und Linwood Smith noted in the first book-length study on Black deaf persons published in 1983 that the term “Black deaf” assumed “a collective whole [of] all the people who share the basic similarities of (a) being Black and (b) being deaf,” which they found problematic as it might invite “laymen [. .] to formulate a set of rules or laws that are believed to describe or predict the behavior of all or most members of this population.” By contrast, “[w]hile certain similarities are shared by the majority of this group, it is not an entirely homogenous group. Individual differences exist with regard to intelligence, social sophistication, etc.” (Hairston and Smith, Black and Deaf 2). As is the case with hearing people, (Black) deaf people constitute a heterogeneous group as regards abilities, which may be reflected in each individual’s social status. As I will discuss at a later point, they thereby also refute the cliché of all Black deaf persons being generally uneducated. 2 For more information on Bowe, see Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 2 COPAS—‘Double Whammy’: Historical Glimpse of Black Deaf Americans Issue 18.2 (2017) In fact, not just with regard to social status or intellectual capabilities are Black deaf persons heterogeneous. The hearing status as well ranges from hard-of-hearing to profoundly deaf, which has an impact on how a deaf person identifies and communicates. The medically determined hearing status does not necessarily overlap with a deaf person’s sense of either belonging to a sign-language using deaf community or to the hearing mainstream; their identity is shaped by their communicative experiences in growing up as well as their personal choices once they reach adulthood. In fact, some deaf persons actively take part in both the deaf and the hearing worlds (Werner, “Lautsprache”). Of course, Black deaf Americans constitute but one of numerous distinctive ethnic deaf groups besides, for instance, Hispanic or Native American deaf persons (Myers et al., “Black Deaf,” 449; Goff and Wood, Step into the Circle). Transnational deaf communities also exist, such as the one of Jewish deaf persons, whose dual identities were and still are shaped by the legacies of both the Holocaust and the forced sterilizations of hereditarily deaf persons during National Socialism in Germany (Zaurov, Gehörlose Juden; Schuchman, “Hungarian Deaf Jews”). The fact that some people experience multifold levels of discrimination is furthermore not limited to the combination of ethnicity and a hearing loss. For example, the deaf gay and lesbian community has faced particular challenges such as in connection with HIV/AIDS education, which reached them much later on account of the language barrier (Klinger, The Social Development). Deaf persons are heterogeneous with regard to their ethnicity, beliefs, and sexual orientation, to name just a few characteristics of “vulnerable groups” (the term is used in medicine for patients with minority status). To be Black and deaf is a multi-facetted phenomenon. However, it is not simply an “unfortunate disadvantage” but it may, at times, have accorded Black deaf individuals more favorable chances of upward social mobility than their Black hearing peers. For instance, in 1983, Hairston and Smith took offence with the clichéd oversimplification that Black deaf people were generally undereducated, underemployed, and consequently stricken with “poor communication skills, low socioeconomic status, and an unfavorable self-image” (Hairston and Smith, Black and Deaf 1). By contrast, so they pointed out, being Black and deaf could also provide means for positive identification: “Many deaf people have high expectations of themselves. Many Black deaf people are the only persons in their family to attend and graduate from college” (Hairston and Smith, Black and Deaf 7). 3 COPAS—‘Double Whammy’: Historical Glimpse of Black Deaf Americans Issue 18.2 (2017) Black deaf persons as a group and individually have significantly contributed to breaking down color lines. However, comparatively little research on Black deaf persons is available, and historical studies are particularly scarce. In this article, I therefore provide an overview of defining developments in Black deaf history, whereby I focus on how Black deaf persons have interacted with Black hearing as well as with white hearing and deaf peers. I start out discussing available written historical sources, after which I reflect on deafness as race matters in the past and present. This leads me to discussing changes in the significance of signed language3 for Black deaf persons. I close by analyzing important instances of Black deaf activism and its impact on desegregating education generally.4 A Note on Sources Written sources on deafness present a particular challenge; after all, vocal language is a second language for many deaf persons—especially for those who are genuinely deaf or who lost their hearing before the acquisition of speech (pre-lingual deafness). Written language follows the same grammatical rules as spoken language. Especially for pre-lingually deaf persons, learning to read and write means learning an abstract foreign language—some Black deaf persons nonetheless acquire excellent writing skills. Signed languages like American Sign Language (ASL) follow different grammatical rules. A three-dimensional visual form of communication, ASL cannot easily be transcribed into two-dimensional writing without losing some of the possible nuances of the combination of hand positioning and movements with facial expressions, lip movements, and the positioning of the upper body. Comparatively few sources on deafness written from deaf perspectives are therefore available, especially when we go further back in history such as before schools for deaf persons existed—the first American school for the deaf was founded in Hartford, CT, in 1817 (Lane, When the Mind Hears). 3 In this article, I use both the terms “sign language” and “signed language”; I use the latter as a more general term to emphasize the fact that, especially in the past, we cannot be sure to what extent signs correlated with the standards of today’s American Sign Language (ASL)—they could also have been dialects, Black Sign Language, or might have followed the structure of the English language.

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